Remembering Nelson Mandela and His Fight for Climate Justice

Nelson Mandela, who died last week, is best known for his fight
against South African apartheid. But his long walk to freedom also
included steps toward solving this mammoth problem called climate
change. He envisioned a world where all people are able to live a
fully dignified life, with clean air to breathe and clean water to
drink—and where poor countries are not left with the repercussions
of rich nation's dirty ways.

Six years ago, Mandela founded The Elders, a cross-cultural group
of leaders from across the globe, including former President
Jimmy Carter and former United Nations Chief Kofi Annan, to forge
human rights-based solutions to worldwide problems. One of the
group's top priorities is climate
justice, which is not only about reducing greenhouse gas
emissions, but also about ensuring the protection of those people
and regions most vulnerable to the worst of climate change's
impacts.

The morning of Mandela's death, the first thing I read when I
woke up was a New York Times op-ed from Bjorn Lomborg
stating that what the world's most vulnerable "really want" is
something that would leave them even more insecure under a
destabilized climate: cheap, dirty, coal-based energy. Lomborg
cited South Africa—where Mandela lived, fought, was imprisoned,
and bled for a better life for his people—as an example of a
place where people want this dirty fuel.

Mandela never bought into that line of thinking. He was fully
aware of how global warming had already been causing havoc on his
continent, destroying through oppressive heat what Europeans
hadn't already decimated through the oppressive regimes of
slavery, colonization, and apartheid.

While Mandela and countless other peers such as Kwame Nkrumuah
and Steve Biko were able to help Africans overcome some of these
regimes, the heat created from them still remains. The pillaging
of Africa's natural resources through mining (oil, coal,
diamonds, etc.), deforestation, and other European industrialized
forces led to the ramped up blasts of carbon dioxide and methane
that trap heat in the atmosphere, reconfiguring ecosystems and
destroying habitats all over the planet. If Europe's quest to
exploit and export Africa's most valuable goods wasn't enough,
the continent must now suffer the import of the worst of climate
change's assaults to boot. It's for these reasons that Mandela
aligned himself with other South African leaders who want to move
beyond the oppressive extractive industries of the past and
toward a cleaner, more sustainable economy, as I explained in
my response to Lomborg on Thursday.

In an op-ed last month, Kofi Annan wrote: "It is essential that
governments start phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, which
currently account for about $485 billion a year, and are far
greater than the global investment in renewable energy. While
cutting subsidies is an issue for developed and developing
countries alike, it remains true that the Group of 20 countries
accounted for 78 per cent of global carbon emissions from fuel
combustion in 2010."

An appreciation for the beauty and subsistence of nature is not
something that occurred to Mandela in just the final years of his
life. During his 27 years in jail, he fought to have a garden
installed on the roof of his prison, where he and his fellow
inmates could grow vegetables for their meals. "To plant a seed,
watch it grow, to tend it and then harvest it, offered a simple
but enduring satisfaction," he wrote in his autobiography. "The sense of
being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a small
taste of freedom." This thinking was consistent with the African
freedom fighter, Amilcar Cabral, whose liberating ideology was
grounded in giving Africans agricultural and sustainable
development skills, so that they could subsist from their own
work.

Over the past decade, one of Mandela's prime missions was giving
Africans access to clean water. In his 2002 "No Water, No Future"
speech to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in
Johannesburg, Mandela said, "That our government has made
significant progress in bringing potable water nearer to so many
more people than was previously the case, I rate amongst the most
important achievements of democracy in our country." This spirit
was championed by the Nobel prize-winning, Kenyan environmental
leader Wangari Maathi, who had the opportunity to address Mandela
on his birthday in 2005. In that speech, Maathi said:

During the last thirty years of working with the Green Belt
Movement I saw the need to give our people values. The man whose
birthday we celebrate today exemplifies these values. For
example, the value of service for the common good. How shall we
motivate our men and women in the region, willing to sacrifice
and volunteer so that others may have it better? The values of
commitment, persistence and patience, to stay with it until the
goal is realized…The love for the land and desire to protect it
from desertification and other destructive processes.

Maathi said that Mandela's life was inspiration for her own work,
as did fellow Kenyan (or American of Kenyan heritage) Barack
Obama in his statement on Mandela's death last week. Mandela's
influence continues to captivate many other climate justice,
environmental justice, and social justice leaders across the
globe. 350.org leader Bill McKibben cited the divesture campaigns
against apartheid as the blueprint for his movement's own
strategy against the fossil fuel industry.

But it's important that, in considering Mandela's legacy with
climate change, we remember the justice component. In The Elders'
strategic framework plan for 2014-2017, under the goal of
eradicating poverty and increasing sustainable development, is a
strategy for achieving climate justice. It reads: "We will
highlight the impact of climate change, and the degradation of
natural resources, particularly on poor people, and emphasise the
need for inter-generational justice—not expecting future
generations to pay for present irresponsibility." For world
leaders to disregard this would be a dishonor to what Mandela
lived for, as would any call to increase fossil fuel use in South
Africa or anywhere else in the world. Those who continue to fight
for climate justice should feel proud that a giant like Mandela
included it in his steps in that long walk toward freedom for all
people.

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